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Without knowing the details of the thirteen thousand contracts cancelled, we don't know.

As a thought experiment ad absurdum, we can save 100% of the cost of government by shutting down the entire government.

... but then what happens next? This trivial exercise demonstrates how on-the-surface positive metrics can hide costs that either aren't being tracked at all or aren't tracked here.

On this topic: some fascinating research recently out of Yale https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/study-reveals-stark-diffe... investigated the known discrepancy in life expectancy in the American South vs. other states. Their conclusion is that likeliest cause is weather. The reason it didn't show up is that metrics weren't tracking the secondary effects of a region being smashed by one or two hurricanes a year; immediate death tolls are in the low dozens and wouldn't move the needle, but the shared cost of infrastructure rebuilding puts local and state governments perpetually in a reactionary mode, which means they set up welfare programs that they can never fund. It's those on-paper-existing but perpetually-emergency-drained programs that are likely accounting for the difference in life expectancy; it's not about dying in a hurricane, it's about a mother three years down the line losing her newborn to preventable illness that wasn't caught in time because she can't afford pediatric care and her county doesn't have enough money to subsidize it, they're too busy rebuilding all the bridges that got torn in half by floodwaters before that newborn was even conceived.





> Their conclusion is that likeliest cause is weather.

This is an interesting thought, but where is that concluded? Is that the right link?


Good catch; wrong link. That link is to the research showing the mortality gap in the first place.

Research on cause of gap: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07945-5




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